What's the OLDEST computer you have installed linux on?

**TheFu** · February 2nd, 2012

Around 1993, I loaded Slackware on a 486/33 with 4MB of RAM and a 40MB HDD.
I think the video may have been 256KB and 256 colors.

The day I brought up X/Windows for the first time was fantastic. I could remote into my DEC machine at work over the 9600baud modem!

**a2j** · February 2nd, 2012

does minix2 on 80286 count? I can actually work on that machine, not just run OS on it. Even wrote and compiled my first C "hello world" program.

**TheFu** · February 2nd, 2012

Originally Posted by a2j

does minix2 on 80286 count? I can actually work on that machine, not just run OS on it. Even wrote and compiled my first C "hello world" program.

Minix isn't Linux, so with a strict interpretation - NO. Heck, HP's C compiler had a "strict interpretation" too and lots of my code wouldn't compile on it either.

Before Linux, I tried to install an UNIX-like OS from Mark ... something company ... Coherent? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohere...ting_system%29 I was an ultimate noob at the time and in way over my head. Ended up sending it back because I wasn't ready yet. I'd never actually used a UNIX OS at that point, but I knew I wanted to understand UNIX. At the time, my day job was actually writing real-time software for IBM 360 mainframes.

If you have an i286, you might want to check out Coherent v2. It ran in i286s and was really polished for a CLI-only solution.

**linuxsyst** · February 2nd, 2012

XD lol now im using Asus W5F 10 yr old but it has 2.0 GHz CPU and 1 gb of memory (I added some) 2nd Fujitsu Siemens S612D 9 yr old laptop.

the 2nd fuji there is ubuntu 11.04 lol i was sitting 2 months wit it I CANT put 11.10 there lol on the asus im writing from 11.10

it works very good.

**jsalin** · March 11th, 2012

Oldest PC I ever installed Linux to was 20MHz 386SX with 387 FPU. It was fun to watch the boot text with 2MB of memory it had but I never managed to squeeze past init to shell like some had. With 8MB there was no problem ofcourse and xfree86 worked with the HGA display card as well.

It was some now really old Slackware version.

Speaking of old HW I'm getting an embedded 486DX4 100MHz / 8MB board from friend, which has also ethernet and SVGA. Will try if any recent distro will work with those specs anymore. I'd be happy with SSH and Links, but X with links-x11 would be something.

**HermanAB** · March 11th, 2012

A 200MHz Sun Sparkstation. It worked OK.

**jwbrase** · March 11th, 2012

Does it count if I ran a Linux-on-a-floppy distro rather than installing it to the machine's hard drive? In that case it would be an old AST machine with 40 megs of RAM and a BIOS copyrighted 1995. The hard drive is significantly newer than the rest of the machine, so it doesn't count.